Archive | January 6, 2014

I’ve made hard decisions before. I had the power of atty for my mom when she had dementia. I had to okay when she got psych meds. That was a no brainer. They called me at 9 pm for permission and she had started screaming non-stop at 9 am. My concern then was that they hadn’t saved themselves the trouble and called me at 9:30 am.

I had to sign the DNR for her. I made the agreement for putting her in hospice. None of those things really bothered me. They seemed like common sense to me. I know my mother refused to do a DNR for dad and he was furious about it and kept ripping out his IVs and they kept putting them back in because mom insisted. So when it came time to do it for her I was not going to mess around and even ask her. After I signed her into hospice for her congestive heart failure and kidney failure they wanted to know if it also applied to her liver failure. I didn’t realize you have to do it for each new diagnosis. It didn’t matter it would have been stupid to revive her and treat one thing. If I ever get in that state I hope no one tries to keep me here and it’s why I have a horror of Catholic hospitals since they have a bad habit of not honouring them.

So why is it so hard to let my Liath go? At the moment she doesn’t seem to be in pain and wants to cuddle a lot and purr. The swelling in her abscesses has gone down but that will only last until the antibiotic shot wears off. I wrote the vet for the script for the compounding pharmacy and hope it won’t be stratospherically expensive. I also asked for the cost of putting her to sleep and cremation and felt horrible doing it. And I believe in being allowed for humans to decide when they die, why is it so hard doing it for my companion?